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I understand the frustration and confusion of people watching this version of Marilyn's life,especially those who didn't read the book or understand that this was a piece of fiction. Joyce Carol Oates took a lot of liberties IMAGINING what Marilyn went through and felt at various points in her life and came up with this amazing empathic story. She tried to fill in the flesh and blood around the bones of the fascinating, complicated and controversial story of the life of Marilyn Monroe. As people have said, she is commenting on how women are used, how in particular sexy women are used or abused in our society, and how a beautiful, resourceful, and creative but damaged woman tried to battle the men, the system,and her demons to survive.

I had never seen Ms. Montgomery or Ms. Richardson's work but watched this a long time ago with two friends who are psychologists. We were all very impressed with both performances. My friends said that Ms. Richardson's performance was a perfect depiction of a bipolar and borderline personality. I started watching her later on re-runs of Home Improvement and can only think that the people who don't like her performance were shocked by the difference in the characters. We found her work chilling in this , she was very scary and sad as well, as my friends say these people are. I think this actress is superb. They thought Marilyn appeared to be more full of personality defects and the possible victim of childhood sexual abuse, not psychotic like her mother. They said that everything these days has to do with attachment disorder, it's not so Freudian. Since she was abandoned by her father, and also by her mother when her mother was so sick, she would have had these attachment and abandonment issues as well as the sexual abuse issues, as she was reputedly raped or attacked at one of her foster homes. I believe that was in the book but I'm not sure that is fact.

One of the interesting things they told me was that it tends to be the brilliant people who survive and prevail when they have had this kind of terrible childhood and it is clear in Ms. Oates book that Marilyn was very bright and creative. She knew what her weaknesses were, and what her strengths were and she knew how to survive. Having suffered through out of control people, ( her mother ), she wouldn't have been able to put up with the temper that Joe Dimaggio supposedly had or his controlling nature . She wouldn't put herself in the position her mother had been in,get married and be a traditional wife with a baby and risk being left behind. This would explain her leaving the first two marriages. Then she sought a father figure in Arthur Miller who was yet another controlling figure. It's hard to have a good sexual relationship with a father figure. Also, did she know he was writing about her?

I thought Poppy Montgomery was surprisingly good and gave a very intelligent and moving performance. She gave the essence of the character which is what you want to see. There was real hunger and hurt in her eyes that was startling. There were TV movie like aspects to this film because various characters would pop up and then disappear again and few characters were realized as fully as the title star, but I liked the first three women, Ann Margeret and Ms. Richardson and Ms. Montgomery quite a bit. And I and my friends enjoyed and found the movie to be very interesting and visually beautiful . We also liked the soundtrack, the music very much.

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